I have gone through a revolving door of thoughts on what “immersion” actually means. Sometimes, I think it’s a nonsensical word. Sometimes, I think it’s too subjective a psychological state (much like empathy) to be directly analyzable. Sometimes, I think it’s like agency in that it’s trying to describe the responsiveness of systems.
I recently read a post by Aevee Bee (Heaven Will Be Mine, Neon White) who described the last thing in the context of Disco Elysium and attention. She noticed that players are willing to experiment and even be okay with failures since
The attention you get is fulfilling even when at your expense.
Disco Elysium can be a pretty mean game to your protagonist, but at least for me it’s fun to see how the game systems respond to my weird actions. It’s all an illusion, of course: no game system will be as robust as life itself, but the fact the game could almost account for everything that the player could do inside its system makes the illusion “believable” for lack of a better word.
So to answer the broader question, I think walking in any character’s shoes can be “fun” as long as the narrative systems can adequately respond to the player. It’s notable that no one is extremely critical of Dysfluent’s multiple responses and systems, just the “speed” of the text because it’s so uncomfortable for reading experiences.
Whether system responsiveness or design choices that hinder player agency like timed text work to create an “empathetic” connection is however difficult to say. I’ve written for The Rosebush that I’m skeptical if people will empathize with the message of games with extreme “empathy mechanics” for lack of a better word, even if they understand the point:
It is easy to imagine them playing these games and getting nothing out of the games or, in exceptional cases, being so effective that the games are heavily censored. Knowledge and understanding are not inevitable conclusions; on the contrary, we should expect hostility because trauma is still a stigma in our world. No amount of theorizing will convince a hostile world to think otherwise.
No matter how one spins it, empathizing with the message of a game is a consciously political and psychological decision. One can empathize with the message of a jingoist Call of Duty game and not necessarily empathize with The Archivist and the Revolution. Part of why I wrote the article this way is to avoid suggesting that there are successful methods to get people to feel for other characters or the political message of the game. It’s way too complicated, too vague, and too out of my depth to characterize potential sentiments on a game.
And besides, there are plenty of works I’ve played where I “got” the message but did not actually like the work in any sense of the word. One could say that I empathized with the message, but I didn’t particularly care for it. Or to put it in game studies terminology, the “procedural rhetoric” has persuaded me to think differently, but I otherwise don’t really care for it.
That’s fine, too. There are plenty of political art that isn’t intended to be enjoyable; they only have one purpose: to teach. This didacticism is going to always encounter pushback, both from people who think art is much more and those who reject the message entirely. And there are plenty of people who want to experiment and see how people react to it, a school of thought that I count myself in. I want to see how far people from different sides of the world can understand what I’m trying to do in my games.
To speak of my own experiences, I think it’s been fascinating to see people have strong responses to my restraint in my own works. It’s almost as if people want to exercise their empathy, to search for more text and characterization. To use a recent and representative review:
In the context of this thread, I take it as a desire from players for me to include more “walking in that character’s shoes”. They don’t want to “imagine” walking in the characters’ shoes; they want to walk in them. I find it somewhat amusing that my “problem” might be the total opposite of creators who put too much in their work. I always think that I’m being too heavy-handed, that I wrote too much, and that I don’t really have much to say.
I thought this was “enough empathy/attention/immersion” for my games, but people seem to hunger for more. Almost as if I could even communicate something more. I’m still unsure how to think about this since my authorial influences are writers who pack like ten ideas into a sentence.
Empathy is quite difficult to theorize about, but I like to believe that “wanting to know more” is a stronger empathetic connection than “just connecting to someone”. It’s why I like the attention/responsiveness angle because it creates more multifaceted ways of thinking about player empathy. I’m unsure how many people can “feel” my emotions in my work, and I sorta don’t care – I just want people to create new, complicated, and unusual emotions from playing my games and reflect on them.
In a way, I value contemplation more than empathy itself. People can choose to empathize to a degree, and it’s really hard for the author to have any control with that. But to provoke thought and start wondering about the wider world? I think there’s some leeway there, and that’s where I’ve focused my energies to.